Language can't stay still - just listen to London

Tuesday 1 February 2011 10:47 BST

Yesterday, while getting a haircut, I fell into conversation with the customer in the chair next to mine. An Albanian, he was complaining that "no one in London speaks good English these days". I asked what he regarded as good English, and he surprised me by replying "like on EastEnders - all that old-fashioned cockney".

Previous generations felt that cockney, for all its effusive lack of inhibition, was not something to which one should aspire. But now that cockney is losing ground, it is becoming an object of nostalgia. And it really is losing ground. Linguists estimate that it may disappear within 30 years. It is being supplanted by what they call Multicultural London English, which you may know by the catchy yet misleading name Jafaican.

Multicultural London English is easily recognised by features such as the use of tag questions - "innit" or "is it" - which certainly aren't invitations for a response. Infused with Afro-Caribbean seasoning, it is employed by (mostly young) Londoners of every imaginable background. Critics maintain that it is phoney - "Jafaican" implies this - but it is an authentic, organic variety of English and it looks likely to become more prevalent.

This is only one of the many different forms of the language that can be heard in London today. Although we tend to talk about English as if it is something monolithic, there are numerous Englishes. Tune into the conversations happening around you in a café or on the Tube, and you'll make out a mosaic of variants.

One reason for this is the large number of other languages spoken by Londoners - at least 300. Among the more prominent of these are Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu and Gujarati, as well as Caribbean creole, Cantonese, Polish, Arabic, Tagalog and Greek. On a recent hour-long bus journey, I heard Russian, Portuguese, Turkish and Yoruba. As passengers flitted between native and adopted languages, it was clear these had become intertwined.

English has prospered through assimilating terms from other languages, and engagement - in London and beyond - with speakers of foreign languages has enabled this, while also propagating hybrids such as Hinglish (a blend of Hindi and English).

London English has long been wildly diverse. In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer absorbed words of French and Italian origin; recycling them was a way to make his writing appear more dignified. Today the multiplicity of tongues on our streets means scope for cross-pollination is much greater.

We find it convenient to think of there being a single, fixed English, but daily experience confirms that ours is a boisterous parliament of tongues. In examining this subject I take a descriptive view - trying to observe and report what is happening to English. Just yesterday Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph condemned this as "anarchic".

A descriptive approach to language change does not eclipse the cogent arguments for teaching in schools a standard form of written English. But the spoken language will always be elastic. It is the spoken language that is the great driver of change, and in London scarcely a day goes by without our noticing some addition or adjustment. This can be disconcerting, but English draws strength from being mobile and protean.

Henry Hitchings's new book The Language Wars: A History of Proper English is published by John Murray.